In defense of Lady Lysa Arryn

[Frey Kings]

On 5/7/2018 at 2:31 AM, theMADdestScientist_ said:

I'm no feminist, but I kind of don't blame Lysa for killing Jon Arryn either, what I don't agree is the reason why she killed him though. She did it because Littlefinger asked, so it's not something that came from her(despite she having all the reasons to do it), but from someone else. If she had done it by her own choice instead of doing it to please someone else, I would have agreed more with her.

 

She killed a innocent person who did no harm  but good in this world, but its okay because "despite she having all the reasons to do it"? what

[Frey Kings]

21 hours ago, Faera said:

I admit I feel sorry for Lysa. She was a full bag of crazy but that really is the end product of what was all and all a miserable life.

Frankly, I'd go as far as to say that Hoster Tully is one of my most hated characters for what he did to her. He was a horrible man. Honestly, I do not blame Lysa for never talking to him or forgiving him. It was an horrible betrayal from someone any child is supposed to trust. Worse still, he almost killed her in the process. Then he married her off to a man old enough to be her grandfather... all when she was, what, fourteen? Fifteen? Then, her marriage to Jon Arryn was blighted by miscarriages, stillbirths and babies dying in the cradle. She had such a pitiful existence.

Agreed!

Marrying her off to a good man to become the 2nd most powerful person in that kingdom, how cruel of her father! These high borns have it so rough! 

[Frey Kings]

20 hours ago, zandru said:

Hear, hear! It's funny that Catelyn remembers him so fondly, as a good father and good ruler. She clearly saw a different side of him than poor Lysa. Well, Cat was apparently given "lord training", since Edmure came along so late, so she got to see more of the "big picture" and the politics, as well as being the favored sibling. Lysa ended up being the ditzy, boy-crazy little sister. Ironically, even Petyr never cared for her.

Actually Hoster ran the Riverlands very well and look at the state it is now.

[Angel Eyes]

3 hours ago, Lordth said:

Walder ain’t no Lord of Riverrun that quote is from the stupid blasphemous TV show! 

 

On topic Lysa is nothing but puppet of LF dancing on his tunes!Dont have any sympathy for her action in main series 

It’s the same result.

 

As for Lysa, I pity her.

[Frey Kings]

21 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

Hoster Tully is one of my least favorite characters in the series (and that's saying something), since he essentially created Littlefinger because he wasn't worthy of Catelyn. Aborting Lysa's child nearly proved fatal for Lysa, and pairing her with Jon Arryn, an old man who already has fecundity issues is going to aggravate Lysa's own limited ability to produce a healthy child. This drove her to Littlefinger, who had an affair with her and persuaded her to kill Jon. As a result of the fallout, to quote Lord Frey (I changed the quote slightly to make daughters plural):

"Look at us now, Tully! You're dead, your daughters' dead, your grandson's dead, your son spent his wedding night in a dungeon, and ...I'm lord of Riverrun!"

6. Stannis can't be that harsh. Shireen's a sweet girl.

Hoster Tully didn't create littlefinger

Cersei didn't create Joffrey

Reek didn't create Ramsay

 

The only mistake Hoster did was not beheading LF

[Faera]

6 minutes ago, Frey Kings said:

Marrying her off to a good man to become the 2nd most powerful person in that kingdom, how cruel of her father! These high borns have it so rough! 

Well, from Lysa’s POV, yes it was cruel. She was a fifteen year old girl who had already been through a horrific ordeal being married to a much, much older man with know fertility problems - yep! That was unfair. Yet even then Cat remembers Lysa trying to make the best of it, excited at the possibility of having a baby. I imagine the countless lost children just drove her further and further over the edge. 

None of that makes it right to eventually kill her husband but I get how someone like Lysa ended up the way she is and I feel sorry for her.

[Geddus]

12 hours ago, zandru said:

Well, once Catelyn regains her faculties following the attack, she puts together the place Bran was found, the fact that The Kingslayer didn't go on the hunt, and that he and Cersei were seen in the tower where Bran fell on that day. Good work! But she then assumes that the golden twins also sent the assassin, which turns out not to have been true. Even Tyrion (the sharpest tool in the shed) doesn't figure out whodunit until the day of the perp's wedding, at which he dies and thus escapes punishment ;-)

Yes but that was after the catspaw, at that point it was obvious that someone wanted Bran dead and it was just a matter of connecting the dots. Before that, tho, the boy's fall had been considered an accident by everyone.

[Lord Varys]

The words of the Tullys are 'Family, Duty, Honor'.

Lysa stopped being a part of Hoster's family after the man murdered her child in her womb and forced her to marry an old man she clearly didn't want to marry.

One can imagine how much pleasure Lysa felt when she heard about her father's condition and how she knew she could help all those ingrates at her former home, and decided to do nothing.

That is understandable. The amount of resentment she must have felt over this whole thing cannot be overestimated.

As to the murder of Jon Arryn:

The only positive thing she got out of this dreadful marriage was her only child. And now this man threatened to take that away from her, shipping her off to a damp island ruled by a joyless, miserable man whose his own child had caught greyscale.

Robert Arryn didn't have to be frail child that he was to consider that a reasonably bad idea - and Lysa didn't have to be as anxious and unhinged as she was to want to do everything in her power to stop it.

In fact, it would have been equally bad to send Robert as a ward to cold and dreary Winterfell - location-wise Casterly Rock, Highgarden, Oldtown, or the Arbor would have been much better places.

And we should not shift the blame to Littlefinger for the murder here. It was Lysa. She went to Littlefinger and while he may have given her the poison and told her what to do with it, we don't yet know whether she asked Petyr for poison (or another means to rid herself of her husband) or whether she had been persuaded to do this. I don't think she needed persuasion.

Still, her motivation for this murder is pretty understandable. Jon Arryn was a very old man already, a man she never loved, never liked all that well, who was trying to take the last joy she had left in this world.

15 hours ago, Megorova said:

Well, Lysa did knew what kind of person Ned was. So maybe she was afraid, that when he will arrive to King's Landing, he will start snooping around, questioning details of Jon's death, even without someone pushing him to do that. And thus he may start to suspect, that Jon's death wasn't natural. Then he will look into motives, for whom Jon's death could have been favourable. Or who could have had a grudge against Jon. So eventually he could have found out about what Lysa did. Because that's the kind of guy he was. So Lysa's trap for Ned and Cat, was just a preventive measures, to defend herself from them.

The whole thing was indeed more of a smokescreen to hide the truth from the Starks (and others) who might investigate the death of Jon Arryn rather than a means to fuel the feud between the Lannisters and Starks. It might be that Petyr came up with that idea to calm Lysa and convince her to go through with the plan.

Now, for Littlefinger this thing had the additional bonus of ensuring that Ned accepted Robert's offer and became Hand - and, as he undoubtedly hoped, the arrival of Catelyn in KL, too. His plan then would have been to use the letter Lysa sent to Cat as an opening to continue their old relationship, claiming that he knew all about the letter because he was such a trusted friend of Lysa's over all these years, etc.

Littlefinger's goal was to eventually get Cat back, Lysa's to eventually marry Littlefinger after the man had secured a title allowing them to marry without causing a great scandal and threaten their power over the Vale. For Lysa Littlefinger was always plan A, for Littlefinger Lysa was always plan B.

[zandru]

2 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

It was Lysa. She went to Littlefinger and while he may have given her the poison and told her what to do with it, we don't yet know whether she asked Petyr for poison (or another means to rid herself of her husband) or whether she had been persuaded to do this. I don't think she needed persuasion.

This, too, is a plausible scenario! And, as you describe, Baelish was quick to see the potential to further create chaos among the major families that he hated.

[Lord Varys]

10 minutes ago, zandru said:

This, too, is a plausible scenario! And, as you describe, Baelish was quick to see the potential to further create chaos among the major families that he hated.

Considering how well Littlefinger and Varys work together in the dagger lie thing it is actually not that unlikely that these two were both in with Lysa in Jon Arryn's murder. Neither of those men would have profited from Stannis becoming the heir presumptive to the Iron Throne, and it is conceivable that Varys approached Littlefinger and told him about Stannis and Jon's investigation of the bastards. It is also possible that Lysa told Littlefinger about this, sure, but I'm not so sure she cared so much about what her lord husband was doing with Stannis. Especially not after she learned about what Jon intended to do with Robert.

What people usually overlook is that Littlefinger isn't Mr. Huge Spynet in the books. He has his agents but he doesn't control a vast network of informers. He is dependent on Varys to get certain information, and considering that both Stannis and Jon knew they were going directly against Cersei and the considerable power the Lannisters had assembled at court over the years, it is reasonably likely that they at least tried to keep their movements and investigation as secret as possible.

It makes sense that they could not keep them from Varys but one assumes that a determined person can keep things from both Littlefinger and Cersei if they want to.

In that sense - the original rationale behind Lysa's letter could always have been to cover the tracks of the people really involved in the murder - Lysa's own as well as those of her accomplices - rather than to set some complicated machinery in motion to create a civil war.

It is not that Ned Stark wasn't already suspicious of the Lannisters before he read that letter, nor is it that Cersei didn't have a very good motivation to murder Jon Arryn.

In fact, Jon's death - as well as the dagger lie later on - actually helped to postpone the inevitable civil war that would come - in some form or another - as soon as the truth about the twincest came out.

If Littlefinger and Varys had named the true owner of the dagger - King Robert Baratheon - things may have escalated much earlier. Ned may have confronted Robert at once, and when push had come to shove Robert and Cersei/Jaime may have realized who was behind that attempt.

I have no doubt that Robert would have protected his son - while he believed he was his son, that is - causing Ned to be forced to cut ties with the Baratheon regime.

And if nobody had figured it out or publicly revealed that Joffrey was the guilty party Ned would have believed that Cersei or Jaime had stolen the dagger from Robert (who most likely would have admitted that he won the thing and then lost it - unless, of course, he gave it to Joff as a gift).

That things go down so badly for Ned and the Starks actually has little to do with Littlefinger's manipulations but more with Cat's abduction of Tyrion and Ned's own poor choices at court - sending away his men, telling Cersei what he had learned, refusing Renly and Littlefinger's help, etc.

If one of those had gone differently, if the Starks and Tullys had been able to make the first move in the inevitable war - while perhaps also being capable to make common cause with either Renly or Stannis - Tywin and his brood may have done down the road the Starks took in the end.

[Sea Dragon]

Lysa was crazy before the abortion that her dad made her have. Lysa raped Baelish. In this medieval world a dad has that right to do that evn though that would never happen and  be accepted now. Wow or maybe since after the 1970's because my mom said that parents were still very controlling then. That is scary. 

[Angel Eyes]

8 hours ago, Frey Kings said:

Cersei didn't create Joffrey

 

She did. 

[Bitterblooms]

4 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

She did. 

Nature or nurture? I think in Joffrey's case it's probably both. I mean, his siblings seem pretty normal. 

[Angel Eyes]

1 hour ago, Bitterblooms said:

Nature or nurture? I think in Joffrey's case it's probably both. I mean, his siblings seem pretty normal. 

Yeah, it's both. I'm surprised that Cersei didn't try to spin Joffrey's psychopathy as Targaryen madness, since the Baratheons are related to the Targaryens (Rhaelle daughter of Aegon V was Robert's paternal grandmother).

[Geddus]

8 hours ago, Bitterblooms said:

Nature or nurture? I think in Joffrey's case it's probably both. I mean, his siblings seem pretty normal. 

I think it's mainly nurture: Joffrey's the result of Cersei's focused parenting efforts. He doesn't seem mad to me, only a not very smart, extremely spoiled bully with unlimited power.

[The Commentator]

On 5/8/2018 at 2:35 PM, Sea Dragon said:

Lysa was crazy before the abortion that her dad made her have. Lysa raped Baelish. In this medieval world a dad has that right to do that evn though that would never happen and  be accepted now. Wow or maybe since after the 1970's because my mom said that parents were still very controlling then. That is scary. 

Sea Dragon,

What Hoster Tully did to his daughter would ruin many girls.   Maybe he had a right to do that as her father but it does not change the fact that doing something like that would mess up a lot of girls.  There is little doubt that Lysa might have taken advantage of Petyr during a vulnerable point in his life.  She is not the only person in the story to do this, but perhaps the only female.  She cared for him and maybe even nursed him (not in the same way she nursed Robyn).  

Let's look at it from Lysa's pov.  This husband of hers wants to take away her fragile boy and send him off to some place where he can catch Greyscale and foster him under a man who many doesn't want to see inherit the throne.  How many moms would want to foster their sickly child under the same roof with Selyse, Patchface, and Mellissandre.  Lysa had no way to resist what was about to happen.  Except to kill Jon.  

 

[The Commentator]

On 5/8/2018 at 7:38 AM, Frey Kings said:

Marrying her off to a good man to become the 2nd most powerful person in that kingdom, how cruel of her father! These high borns have it so rough! 

I get that the commons have it worse.  But that doesn't make Lysa's road any easier.  

[The Mother of The Others]

So the only thing left for me to tackle is the accusation that Jon Arryn had bad breath.   Well, if this really bothered Lysa she was in an excellent position to do something about it by changing the old man's diet, having a spicy chef tossed out the window, supplying her husband with a mint, the list goes on.

[theMADdestScientist_]

On 5/8/2018 at 8:33 AM, Frey Kings said:

She killed a innocent person who did no harm  but good in this world, but its okay because "despite she having all the reasons to do it"? what

Have you paid attention at Lysa's behavior when Catelyn goes to the Vale with Tyrion? that's the harm her father did to her by marrying her to Jon Arryn. She cried a lot when she was married off to him, and Catelyn does not blame her for that, Jon Arryn was older than her father. And Hoster seems to regret what he did to her right until the end.

Was Jon Arryn innocent though? yes, but he certainly was not a good husband, he couldn't possibly have been, he was too old for her. Lysa's behavior when we first meet her tells us what her life has been. Even as an evil act, she did had reasons to kill Jon, but in the end, she did it for Littlefinger. She just let herself be used, that's where I don't agree with her.

[Angel Eyes]

LSS: I pity the fool.